simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/31/...

@simonwillison.net has a great roundup here!

Great to see NIST take up a wide block cipher mode! At AWS we have to carefully engineer around the 128-bit safety limits. Otherwise hyper-scale systems like VPC, S3, and EBS would exceed those limits in seconds! 256-bits is much more misuse-proof.
csrc.nist.gov/News/2024/ni...

One of the biggest updates to AWS GuardDuty in a while: reporting attack sequences with actionable data instead of only individual findings. No additional cost.

AWS re:Invent 2024 - Uncovering sophisticated cloud threats with Amazon GuardDuty (SEC219)

m.youtube.com/watch?v=3fR2...

The most valuable thing you can do for your career is to be thoughtful about how you spend your time. One of the tools I use most to do that, Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec's principal roles framework, is now available outside Amazon for the first time.

My third talk at re:Invent this year was about patterns for system resilience. Here, I talk about the trouble with retries, metastability, the power of simulation, and some techniques for tackling tail latency: www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvHd...

My second re:Invent talk is up! In this talk, I dive into the internals of thew new Aurora DSQL, looking at how we achieve each of the ACID properties, and highlight some of the decisions we made as we designed the product.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=huGm...

scottaaronson.blog?p=8525

Some folk from software internals discord and I read the series of disaggregated oltp papers and met to talk about them. I wrote an informal overview of the papers and a summary of some of the discussion after each paper: transactional.blog/n...

The fourth and last in my series of blog posts on our new Aurora DSQL database is up! This time, we're looking at what happens during network partitions, and how we preserve consistency, availability, and durability. Check it out: brooker.co.za/blog/2024/12...

Today's third blog post on Aurora DSQL: this time looking at the write and commit path, and how conflicts are detected and handled: brooker.co.za/blog/2024/12...

Talking now about the building blocks approach to building services. Honestly that's why I love the old logo so much. AWS is at its absolute best when it's building low-level primitives vs. tilting at the up-the-stack windmill. It's why we're customers.

"The overall approach here is disaggregation: we’ve taken each of the critical components of an OLTP database and made it a dedicated service. Each of those services is independently horizontally scalable, most of them are shared-nothing, and each can make the design choices that is most optimal..."

US officials urge "turn to encrypted messages" and say they still have not been able to root out Chinese hackers from telco systems.
www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

Reading: Dissecting the Performance Gains in Amazon Q Developer agent for code transformation | AWS DevOps & Developer Productivity Blog - https://buff.ly/493732W
#AWS

D&D Combinatorics xkcd.com/3015

New platform so I get to repost things. First of all, here is the greatest proof of all time

I am devastated that, after multiple meetings with the product team and coming up with increasingly outlandish scenarios, I've been unable to find anything about this feature with which I can take issue.

Even the name is good. Ugh.

aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws-cl...

Rust Foundation Collaborates With AWS Initiative to Verify Rust Standard Libraries

foundation.rust-lang.org/news/rust-fo...